4 ms·
I dunno. It sure makes sense to me to collect telemetry from free software installations, but I feel that having every platform or even piece of software to do
by mordae 4y ago
I dunno. It sure makes sense to me to collect telemetry from free software installations, but I feel that having every platform or even piece of software to do it on its own with opt-out will inevitably lead to people being overwhelmed and angry.
I would, personally, prefer a single non-profit service that would list publicly what is being collected and publish the results as open data for anyone to use. Applications (at least on Linux) would not submit their reports directly, but would use a local relay service that could be turned off completely or that could filter what reports to send to the server and what to /dev/null.
Distributions and other software stores would then make it mandatory for software to use this relay and either patch out any other telemetry from their packages or straight out forbid those that would not comply.
- gen220 4y agoI think the issue of telemetry is fundamentally a human issue of incentives and trust. The system you describe is wise because it recognizes this and attempts to address it. The difficulty with telemetry is that even if we design the perfect, privacy-preserving system to begin with, once the pattern of having a network port open is established, there's nothing to prevent us (humans) from changing our policies about what we're allowed to push/pull over that port. In real-world analogues for these kinds of thorny policy problems, we have centralized arbiters to solve these problems. That might be a fruitful course of research for people interested in this problem to explore. Unfortunately, even though this problem has software as its medium, it is a problem that cannot be solved by clever software alone, despite any appearances to the contrary.
- JohnFen 4y ago> The difficulty with telemetry is that even if we design the perfect, privacy-preserving system The other difficult is what you mentioned: trust. Even if a piece of software really does telemetry in a perfect, privacy-preserving way -- as a user, I have to take the developer's word for that in the end. That's a hard hurdle to pass, because that trust has been violated so much in the past that nobody gets the benefit of the doubt anymore. > Unfortunately, even though this problem has software as its medium, it is a problem that cannot be solved by clever software alone I agree entirely. At the heart of it, this is not a technological problem. It's a human one.